A new era in Michigan football is beginning. We want to hear your thoughts about Michigan's new head football coach Brady Hoke. E-mail your comments to squire@michigandaily.com.

I'm excited. After watching Oregons gimmicky offense get shut down by a good defense, I am glad Michigan will get back to more of a power game. Not 3 yards and a cloud of dust but not reliant on one small QB to do everything. Killed Oregon. Lets use a form of the spread but incorporate it into a power pro style offense. Auburn and the SEC make it work. Michigan needs to too! Go Blue! Go Hoke!
—Lynn Werle

Sounds solid; now let's get on with it after 3 wasted years and see if we can salvage the 2011 season!!
—Joe Corey

Dave,

Pure and simple, you lied to us. We're your fellow alums. We're your paying customers. We're the fans of the football program that has known 131 years of near-constant success and you lied to us.

You promised a "national search". Now you state that 2 of the 3 presumed candidates that you spoke to weren't even offered the job. Your "national search" turned out to be one candidate whose sole qualifications (using the term loosely here) are a 47-50 overall record, two years of real success out of 8 as a head coach, and a few years as a position coach at Michigan. In other words, you had this planned all along and yet you claimed that you would be seeking the "best candidate" from among the many out there. There are many offensive and defensive coordinators in the major college ranks who haven't yet been given their opportunity to be a head coach. There are a few more that have been head coaches in the past and now work as coordinators. Your new coach has never even been a coordinator and yet he was somehow qualified to become the coach at the University of Michigan based on a series of losing seasons and one genuinely successful one at a MAC school and a .500 record at an MWC school. When the University of Florida, which has won 2 national titles within the last 5 years, lost their successful coach to retirement, they immediately plucked Will Muschamp from Texas, a long-time coordinator with no head coaching experience. Their athletic director didn't even bother to lie to his alumni and fans about a "national search". He
simply found a highly-regarded candidate who had been coach-in-waiting at Texas for years. While there may be some dissension amongst the Gator fanbase, most were happy that Foley worked quickly and found a qualified person.

You, on the other hand, let our most recent coach twist in the wind for a month, deceived our fellow alumni and fans, kept our recruits and current players in the dark, and finally presented us with someone whom many regard as a candidate qualified only by his service under one Lloyd Carr; a "qualification" that many, including myself, find to be far more a negative than a positive. Were you not aware that Hoke was quoted recently disparaging the spread option offense as inadequate for the modern college game... despite the fact that said
offense is employed in one fashion or another by a significant number of successful Division 1-A teams and, most prominently, by the two that competed for the national title just last night? That same offense is now firmly embedded in the Michigan football program, which
led to our having one of the most productive offenses in the conference and the Big 10 Offensive Player of the Year. And, yet, after waiting a month and watching our current recruiting class dwindle away, you bring in a coach who took five years to bring Ball
State to any level of success with less than a month to go before signing day and when most of the competent assistant coaches have already found other jobs (as many of Rodriguez's staff already have)? Even if we put aside the falsehoods that you delivered to all of us, does your now-infamous "process" deliver any advantage whatsoever to your selected candidate? Or does it rather deposit him in a hole that he may not be able to dig out of in the next 3 months, much less the next three years? Do you think Michigan fans will tolerate a record of
performance that Hoke demonstrated during his first 3 years at Ball State, one not even as good as Rodriguez's in his three years here?

Tangential to that topic, you spoke of emerging from the "middle of the pack" in terms of coaching compensation.